While out at a conference last week Victor had the opportunity to see some inspiring speakers, one of them being Dr. Jeffrey Life. You may have seen Dr. Life on the cover of magazines or on television, he is an 80 year old man who decided to turn his life around in his late 50s and get into the best shape of his life. Now he travels as an inspirational speaker sharing his wealth of knowledge on all things healthy living. In this episode Victor shares Dr. Life’s 12 Keys to Healthy Living.

In the second half of the show, Victor shares some lessons we can learn from the recent passing of Stan Lee & George H.W. Bush, regarding their estate plans. Victor goes over the importance of not only having an estate plan, but having a complete one.

All that AND some exciting news from Medina Law Group and Private Client Capital Group!

Make It Last with Victor Medina is hosted by Victor J. Medina, an estate planning and Certified Elder Law Attorney (CELA®) and Certified Financial Planner™ professional (CFP). Through his law firm and independent registered investment advisory company, Victor provides 360º Wealth Protection Strategies for individuals in or nearing retirement.

Victor J. Medina: Hey everybody, welcome back to Make It Last. I’m your host, Victor Medina. I’m so glad that you can join us this fine Saturday morning being the last Saturday before Christmas holiday. I’m sorry that we missed you last week.

I got to tell you I was away at a conference and not able to sit for and record for last week’s show. It was time well spent. Every four months or every three months, four times a year, I get to go and hang out with the best estate planning and elder law attorneys in the country.

Then once a year, typically in December, all of these groups come together, about 150, 200 lawyers overall, they come together for a summit, sharing the brightest ideas that they’ve come across. It’s a community of learning. I got the opportunity to do that last week.

In fact, I was somebody who was featured as a speaker there. I got to share some of the stuff that was going on in my practice among 10 other people. I was honored to be included amongst those folks and share what I had with them. That was a lot of fun.

In addition to the sessions that were given by other practicing attorneys, we had the opportunity to learn from three keynote speakers. I was struck by what they had to share. The three speakers that we had, one of them was an attorney that you may have seen with billboards up across Philadelphia area.

His name is John Morgan. He built one of the largest personal injury firms in the country. They do about a billion dollars in revenue. [laughs] I couldn’t imagine what he said. It’s actually one billion dollars. They do about a billion dollars in revenue. They spend about 130 million dollars. He shared some of his secrets on there.

Then there are two other speakers I was also impressed by. One was a gentleman named Dr. Jeffry Life. Dr. Life is the guy that you would see in the airplane magazine, the “Body For Life.” He’s actually licensed his image as in his company.

He’s the guy at 57. He was a general practitioner and realized that his life was going in the wrong direction health‑wise. He committed himself to transforming his body and living a healthy life. In an image that you’ll see in the airplane catalogs, it’s this absolutely ripped guy.

He’s 80 years old. He is as vibrant, I think, today as he might have been when he first went through the transformation. He talked about the 10 keys to healthy living. I wanted to share some of those with you today because I think they’re appropriate. We’ll go a little bit through that.

The other person who spoke was a young woman named Mandy Harvey. If the name doesn’t sound familiar, maybe the circumstances against which she became famous might.

There was a woman who came and sang on America’s Got Talent and what was remarkable about her is she played the ukulele. She sang an original song but she was deaf or she is deaf.

She had lost her hearing essentially when she was 18 or 19 years old due to a connective tissue disorder. Although she had hearing through 18, actually speaks very well. She absolutely has no hearing right now.

She sings by singing into a tuner which tells her if she’s on pitch or not and through vibrations. There’s a lot of muscle memory involved. What was striking about all three of those is they really touched upon the ability to make tremendous change, if you have the courage and if you have the right team around you.

That was a great lesson for me because I feel like more recently, I have been living a little bit more of a timid existence. Because of the fear that I might have about either growing larger or looking to take advantage of what this life has to offer. Those were really important messages for me to hear. I wanted to share a little bit with Dr. Jeffry Life and what he shared.

I just run quickly through the 10 keys to healthy living that he shared with us. They might be helpful for you as well. Anyway, that’s a very long explanation about why we weren’t around last week. We replayed last week’s show. Of course, if you’re a podcast subscriber, nothing happened. You just didn’t have a new episode last week, and you’ll have this episode with you now.

If you’re listening onto the radio, you will note that we replayed one of my favorite shows last week about three concepts simply explained. That’s episode number 40. I think we’re on episode number 83 or so right now.

I’m interested to welcome you into the holiday season. We have some year‑end planning. I have some important news to announce regarding my practice and my firm. A few things different going on there, and that’ll be fun to share with you.

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Victor: Just too much going on that’s because back‑to‑back travel. I was in Kansas City. Then I was again in Orlando for that coaching program with those other attorneys, and so we missed the show. No other way to say it. All right, hold on. We’re going to take a quick break right now. It’s a short segment. When we come back, I’m going to share with you the 10 keys to healthy living.

Then go over other quick five year‑end planning, holiday planning stuff. We will be right back on Make it Last.

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Victor: Hey everybody, welcome back to Make It Last. One of the things that I wanted to share with you were the 12 keys to maintaining a healthy body and brain that were shared with me with Dr. Jeffry Life.

Dr. Life was somebody who at 57 was when he discovered himself out of shape and the energy that you see of him on the airplane catalogs is absolutely ripped, guys. About 80 years old, he still looks that way.

He put together about 12 things that he thought were important to maintaining a healthy body and brain. I’m going to go through these pretty quickly and explain some of them along the way. Now one of them, which is key, is keeping your blood sugar low.

One of the things we want to make sure is many times people eat at a level that raises their insulin so that it stays at a peak level for a very long time. What ends up happening is that it makes it very difficult to burn any kind of fat when your insulin levels remain high.

If you have four meals a day and they are very highly glycemic meals, what will happen is your insulin will spike and stay spiked. Then makes it difficult to burn any fat or end up having some issues related to having high blood sugar or diabetes. One of the things you want to do is keep your blood sugars low so that your insulin levels remain low as well.

The second one is exercising daily. He actually recommends three different ways to do that. You definitely want cardio. You want to exercise your heart. Some flexibility training, so he does a lot of yoga and pilates to keep the joints in good shape.

Then strength training because, of course, the more muscle mass you have, the easier it is to burn calories and stay at a healthy weight going forward.

Related to that, then the third one is maintaining muscle mass and strength. What you need to do is a lot of resistance training in order to continue to maintain your muscle mass and be able to continue to use those muscles going forward.

Number four was avoiding or eliminating belly fat. This is one of those central ones that’s one of the issues with the heart conditions that can lead to stroke. He shared that the central obesity ‑‑ this fat that is in the middle of your body ‑‑ does contribute to a lot of heart problems. If we can eliminate belly fat, we would be better off for that.

The fifth one was maintaining optimal hormone levels. The sixth one is maintaining ideal blood pressure. Ideally, what you want to do is you want to be below 120/80. Anything below that would be recommended, and so you want to be able to do that.

I quickly went over the hormone levels. The key hormones to watch, by the way, are estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, your thyroid levels, your growth hormone, melatonin, insulin, cortisol. Those are all things that are in there.

On the blood pressure, again, less than 120, over less than 80. That would be ideal. By the way, you can go ahead and get yourself a blood pressure cuff, if you would like. Those are available on Amazon.

The seventh one is minimizing oxidative stress and inflammation. The eighth one is taking essential nutraceuticals and pharmaceuticals. The ninth one is leading a purposeful life. The tenth one is achieving great sleep. By the way, great sleep is really important for a number of reasons.

Sleep also improves your immune function, and poor sleep is linked to increased oxidative stress and inflammation. Sleep also happens to affect emotions and social interactions. Poor sleep is linked to all forms of dementia. Sleep is really important, by the way. I have been able to see that in my own life.

One of the things that many people aren’t aware is that I used to be about 35, 40 pounds heavier over the last year or so.

When I was at my maximum weight loss process, when I was losing the most amount of weight most consistently, I was sleeping best at that point in time. I was putting a lot of sleep. I don’t know how that was related. In my own life, turns out that it was pretty important.

The 11th one was building great relationships with family, friends and colleagues. Then protecting your arteries. We want to make sure that you eliminate forms of arterial disease that ends up increasing immune function, reducing vascular dementia, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, stroke, hypertension, Type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis, aging, insulin resistance.

It is important to make sure that your arterial disease is controlled or eliminated. Those are the 12 keys to healthy aging. One of the first things that most people can start to do is work on their blood sugars and their exercise.

A lot of things flow from that. I had higher blood pressure and bad hormone levels. Turned out as I lost that weight, it made it a lot easier for me to essentially maintain all of those good things.

When I was losing the weight, everything self‑corrected over there. I tell you. It’s inspiring to have him go ahead and share some of his tricks or tips, anyway. It turns out that these are important things to change in your life.

At the same time, we have to remember that it’s never too late. I think his quote was, “It’s the goals to make the rest of your life the best part of your life. Anyone can start at any time.” I was inspired to watch him come and speak.

He’s actually available if people want to go ahead and engage him. He’s in Virginia. You can contact him at drlife.com. For a price, he’ll go in, run through your metabolic portfolio, give you recommendations on what to do, consult with you on a concierge‑level, health, relationships. I thought that was important to share.

As I was mentioning before, my own journey was something that I thought was transformative in my life. One of the things that I remarked being most grateful for was the opportunity to be living a healthier life. Look, I wasn’t out of control. I wasn’t somebody who was 300 pounds.

I definitely had a lot of those central obesity issues. I wasn’t as fit. I wasn’t making great food choices. It was transformative to go through that weight loss. Also, the strength training and other things that relate to their ability to feel like I’m in the best position possible going forward.

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Victor: Anyway, I want to take a quick break here and share with you some news that’s coming up with my practice, things that you should be aware of, opportunities for you to come join us on an upcoming program and things like that. Stick with us. We will be right back here on Make It Last.

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Victor: Hi everybody. Welcome back to Make It Last. You’re joining me today as I go through a little bit of what I’ve been going through in the last couple of weeks, a little bit of a personal journey.

I was away at a coaching program. I got the opportunity to hear some inspiring speakers. I want to share something new that’s going on in my life that’s, actually, going to be helpful for people out in the community.

One of the things that we are doing with the practice is we’re moving offices. So everything is a little crazy in the office right now. Boxes everywhere about to come tumbling down on top of us. We’re not moving that far. We’re moving about a half a mile down the road from where we’ve been for the last 10 years.

I had the opportunity to purchase a building that was being used as a professional office space for a number of years. The story behind that is that it was the home of an advertising agency for about 30 years or so. Before the matriarch who started that passed away, we had the opportunity to buy that building.

Why that’s important is the building came with a built‑in educational space. One of the dreams that I’ve had over my career is to open up a resource center for the community where people would have the opportunity to come in and learn about the topics that I thought were important for great living.

Whether it was legal and retirement planning or had to do with elder care, we wanted the opportunity to be able to engage with the community in that fashion. This building will give us the opportunity to do that.

We’re going to be moving to 230 West Delaware Avenue in Pennington. That’s going to be our main office space with the educational center that we’re creating.

One of the first things that we’re going to do is we’re going to host a series of seminars. This is the part that is important for you. If you wanted to learn more about estate planning and legal planning, one of the things that you can do is bookmark February 7th and February 12th. February 7th should be a Thursday, and February 12th should be a Tuesday.

We’re going to hold two sets of seminars in our new educational space. They’re absolutely free for the community. There’s no obligation to come and attend.

Really, what we’d like to do is share a lot of the information that we have about great legal planning, so that people have the opportunity to take that and make changes in their life and get themselves in a better position.

If you’re interested in attending that, I can tell you to do is go ahead and contact our office. You can reach our office at 609‑818‑0068. If you call between Christmas and New Year’s, we might be a little crazy with the move because that’s when we planned moving everything. If you leave a message, we’ll contact you back and we’ll put you on the calendar.

Our Thursday seminar, on the 7th, is going to be at 1:00 PM. It’s going to be in the middle of the day if you have the opportunity to join us. Then 12th, the Tuesday, is going to be an evening seminar at 6:00 PM. We want to make sure that you have those two dates locked down.

Contact us at 609‑818‑0068, or you can email us at info@medinalawgroup.com and let us know that you’re interested in attending the retail seminar. We will go ahead and register you for that. You’ll have an opportunity to meet me in person and join us.

By the way, everyone who attends will get the opportunity to get a free book, one of the three that I’ve published either in elder law and estate planning or in retirement planning. If you’re interested in any of that, that’s a good thing to come and do as well.

Those are the seminars that are coming up. Really exciting things that are going on in terms of changing our practice around to the inside of this new space. I can’t tell you how excited I am for this transition.

One of the big themes on this coaching program we went to was the opportunity to live a full life and overcome fear about that. This is going to be one of the ways that we’re going to do it.

We had some news come up that was sort of topical. We had a few very notable celebrity deaths. One had to do with Stan Lee and the other with George Bush, the first 41, number 41 President Bush. Good lessons coming from that.

With Stan Lee, he passed away at 95 years old. He was ill for a number of years. What was interesting was, first, his wife of nearly 70 years died last year.

He reported that about $1.4 million went missing from his bank accounts. He was essentially taken advantage of by people who he had trusted. It’s hard to know exactly what went on because there’s a lot of allegations in there.

One of the things that we can learn lessons from there is a few basic estate planning steps that everyone should be taking, and the center around planning for incapacity or a disability with some organizing documents, like a power of attorney. You want to make sure that those are in place.

Monitoring and maintaining a plan is one of those essential things that can become difficult as you age, especially if you start to suffer from cognitive decline or if somebody fears that you’re suffering from that. We want to make sure that what you’re doing is putting people in place that you trust in order to help you along the way.

It’s hard to know who those folks are going to be. I tell clients of mine that are interested in putting these documents in place that there are really two essential features that we’re looking for when we name somebody to be in charge of your stuff, if you become incapacitated. One of them is that they be of impeccable character.

What I found over my career is that, for the most part, people have a great gut feeling about whether or not that’s the case. What I mean is that, if you think that there’s going to be somebody that’s going to be a great choice for that because you know their character and you know they’re never going to do anything to harm you, you’re probably going to be right.

If you have the slightest amount of hesitation about somebody in that role, you likely may also be right. I found that people’s instincts about other people tend to be right on. If you’re in a situation where you’re hesitant to name somebody because you’re not sure that they’re going to act in your best interest, then you probably ought to hit pause on that.

Evaluate it a little bit more because you may, in fact, be right that they’re not going to be working in your best interest and we can find somebody else. There are professional fiduciaries that are out there. Attorney is not my practice. We don’t do it for other people, but other attorneys will serve as fiduciaries.

What I would like about having somebody who’s a lawyer working as a fiduciary in your best interest, a professional fiduciary, is that they’re ‑‑ I hate to put it in this term ‑‑ but it’s true. They’re licensed to practice law and other things is at risk if they do something wrong in your case. There’s a large incentive for them to act in your best interests as your fiduciary.

I find that that’s a really powerful incentive because most of the time, they’re not going to retire being your fiduciary. It’s a role that they’ll take on. It’s a professional thing that they’re willing to do, but they’re making their money other ways, legal planning, being hired as a lawyer as opposed to as a fiduciary.

They want to make sure that they’re doing the right thing if they’re acting as your fiduciary because, of course, you can impact their professional license to do other things. I really like that in that scenario. I’m a little bit devious in holding people’s feet to the fire. It’s trust we’d verify.

I trust that the attorney is going to do the right thing who’s acting as a fiduciary. I also like the incentive that their professional livelihood is at stake if they do something wrong in your planning. That’s a good choice if they have the opportunity to do that, but we also want to increase the communication level with those folks as well.

If we just name them without conversations about what we want them to do, it’s a risk because, first of all, they could be well meaning and just choosing the wrong option out of two things about what you would like. We want to be clear about what you’re looking for in terms of the kind of care you would like provided and what you want done with your assets.

Many times, these people can be constrained of what they can do with your eventual estate planning, so you can limit how much they can gift away, or you can limit how much they can change what your estate planning is.

Sometimes, you want some flexibility because if you’re of average means, you may need Medicaid planning in order to help you protect assets and create flexibility for your long‑term care in the future. We don’t want to give them free range to do whatever they want with your stuff.

Making sure that you’ve got some communication between the people that you’ve named, and you, and having them understand what you would like to have happen in certain circumstances is important. The other thing that’s important too, in this kind of scenario is to have regular updates and checking with it.

It seems to me, in Stan Lee’s case, they put in one set of plans, but there wasn’t anything that was being done to regularly update it. It meant more like it was episodic as opposed to consistent and regular. It looked like he put one estate plan in place. Then he had some other document in reaction to what was going on emotionally.

In the way that you could have that be different in the way that we run our practice is that you can have one estate plan. Then on our client care program where we see people on a regular basis every year, we’re updating that plan actually every year.

Sometimes, it’s just date changes and we’re keeping everything the same. It is an opportunity to really be consistent with the planning that you’re choosing, that you’re naming the same people, that you’re having the same choices in place.

You’re also having a forced interaction with a counselor like an estate planning attorney or planner that will measure what’s going on and make sure that there isn’t any need to make some changes.

You want to make sure that you not only put a plan in place, talk with the people that you have named as fiduciaries, but review it on a regular basis. We want to make sure that you have some checks and balances along the way. I’ll give you one of the ones that I’ve shared on a prior show on the financial. We’ve talked a lot about the legal planning.

Here’s one that’s in the financial as well. We never want to give somebody too much authority in order to make distributions out of your accounts. One of the safeguards that’s in place with the way that we manage money for people is, we have these assets that we’re recommending our investments and they’re over held at Schwab.

They’re not held in my account or anything like that. They’re held at Schwab. Schwab is what we call a custodian. Schwab has some protections in place. For instance, we can’t authorize the check to be sent to a third‑party without the signature of our client.

The only thing that we could do inside of somebody’s account besides some trading based on their investment portfolio and the recommendations we’re making on what investments to hold is that we have to distribute money to someone. The only place that we can send a check without a signature, without a wet signature on it is right back to the client.

There’s no way for me to send a check through the system to some third‑party that’s out there. There’s nobody who can act like that so we need a wet signature on a form in order to be able to authorize that we can even do it on verbal authorization.

Of course, you could always go to Schwab and you can authorize it on your own, but I’m saying that there’s no chance for us to be sending money to a third‑party. That’s the kind of checks and balances that you want to make sure that you’re working with people that are going to not only look out for your best interest but also have the scope of what they can do be limited on them.

There’s other things that you can do reviewing beneficiary designations over the course of time because it goes then those assets are really driven by contract and not by your planning. We want to make sure that those two things are tied together so you could have a great estate plan with a will and a trust.

Things like your IRA or any annuities that you own, that’s all going to be driven by the beneficiary designations that you’ve put on there. I’ll tell you that in our practice, many times we tie the two together that the beneficiary is the trust so that when we make changes to the trust, it flows out through the rest of the planning that we’re doing.

At the same time, if you don’t do it that way, you do want to check what’s going on with the beneficiary designations because we want to make sure that they go to the right people in the right way often there’s many tax consequences and whatnot.

Those are just a couple of lessons that we’ve learned from Stan Lee’s last chapter of his life before he passed away. I tell you, it’s a sad circumstance that so much of what he had done in terms of creating these great characters and really being a self‑made man and what he was able to give out in the world.

This last chapter really ended on a sour note with all of these allegations going back and forth and the money being stolen from him. You don’t have to be somebody who’s ultra‑wealthy in order to be the victim of something like that. Often, it can happen with people that just get too much access and who are not looking out for your best interest.

There are steps that you can take and the core one from that is really get yourself surrounded with a team of professionals that are going to be working on your behalf, looking out for your best interest. If you can have your lawyer and your financial planner be the same person, then that’s going to streamline a lot of what you have as advantages in it.

You have one bat phone that you can pick up any time there’s something in there. My comic book friends are going to yell at me since I made a DC comic reference in a Marvel story but the heck with it. The analogy works. Pick up the bat phone and have one person that can help you along the way.

That’s it for today. Just real quick as a reminder, we are going to be moving offices. It has nothing to do with the radio show. The radio show’s going to continue on, but the fact that we’re moving offices gives us the opportunity to host some educational seminars in our own office.

We invite you to come and join us on February 7th at 1:00 PM at 230 West Delaware Avenue in Pennington or February 12, Tuesday night at 6:00 PM. Light refreshments will be served. It’s just really going to be an educational seminar workshop going on legal planning, really planning for that last, a third act, that second half of life kind of thing.

I urge you to attend. If you’re interested in doing that, you can call 609‑818‑0068, or you can email us at info@medinalawgroup.com. Everyone who attends gets the opportunity to get a free copy of one of my books. I’ll give you the opportunity to go ahead and do that as well.

It’s going to be good seminar if you’ve already done your planning. If you’re a client of ours, but you know that there’s somebody in your life that should come and hear that, we urge you to share this information with them. Go ahead and send them this radio show or send them the information.

Ask them to register that they’re going to have a great time at the seminar, learn a bunch, and may even improve where they are in their planning. That’s it for this show. I wish everybody who celebrates Christmas a wonderful Christmas holiday. We will be back with one more show before the end of the year.

I’ll talk about some year‑end planning tips since you don’t want to miss that coming up next week when we celebrate the end of 2018 and welcoming in 2019.

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Victor: Other than that, this has been Victor Medina and Make It Last where we help you keep your legal ducks in a row and your financial nest egg secure. Catch you next Saturday. Buh‑Bye.

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